Half of Daniel Khalife's Time on the Run Remains a Mystery

Police believe Iranian spy had outside help

Khallfe after he was captured in Northolt. Picture: Met Police

November 28, 2024

Following the conviction of former soldier and prison escapee Daniel Khalife, the police are admitting they still don’t know exactly where he was for nearly half the time he was on the run.

A jury has found him guilty of spying for Iran and he faces a lengthy term in jail when he is sentenced early next year. He eventually entered a guilty plea to the charges relating to his break out from Wandsworth Prison on the morning of 6 September 2023.

He eluded capture for 75 hours and there is still a lack of detail on exactly where he was for about 36 hours. During that time, he managed to get his hands on £400 in cash and the police are convinced he received outside help. However, they have ruled out him getting any assistance from his Iranian handlers or family members.

The 23-year-old tore a pair of trousers into strips and tied himself to the back of a food lorry before making off on foot by a roundabout in the Wandsworth area. By the afternoon of the 6 September, he had changed into an olive green t-shirt and shorts.

At 4.48pm he was filmed walking next to the river by the White Cross pub on the towpath towards Richmond Bridge. Shortly afterwards he was captured on camera entering a Mountain Warehouse shop in Richmond and taking a blue cap and putting into his bag and leaving without paying. At 5.45pm he entered the Rose of York pub and asked to use the phone saying he needed to contact a friend who was supposed to eat.

The police believe that he made his way towards Richmond Park but don’t know precisely where he went.

They were convinced they had tracked him down on that first night to a garden of a house of a relative, but he was not at the address they raided. It is now thought possible that he spent that time wandering the streets in the Richmond area.

Early the following day he entered the Marks and Spencer store in Kew and used cash to buy more clothes for £35.60. By 10:20am he had made it as far as Hammersmith and went into the Sainsbury’s in the Livat Shopping Centre wearing a face mask. At around 11:20am, Khalife bought a Samsung J5 mobile phone for £89 from a shop on King Street.

His subsequent route across south west and west London was captured numerous times on CCTV and at 8pm he was back in the area of Richmond Park.

The following morning (Friday 8 September) his new phone was activated at 8:08am and there is footage of him in a newsagent on Grove Park Road at 8.22am on purchasing a newspaper. He is seen kneeling down to look through copies of the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror before purchasing some credit for his phone using cash.

Khalife buying a newspaper on Grove Park Road. Picture: Met Police

He is then believed to have spent most of the day in Chiswick around the riverside, the old cemetery and Chiswick House Gardens.

After reports of him being spotted started to come in there was an intensive search around the area of Chiswick House Gardens with sightings reported on Strand on the Green, Chiswick Mall and Corney Reach Road.

This prompted a large police presence in the Grove Park area later in the day with a National Police Air Service helicopter observed circling above Chiswick House Gardens until around 5am on Saturday morning. It is believed that Khalife may have made a call to his Iranian handlers at this point, but they failed to come to his assistance.

He was seen again the following day entering a McDonald’s in Southall at 9:42am and buying an espresso. It is unclear how he managed to get undetected from Chiswick to Southall. Detective Constable Fabio D’Altilia, who was in plain clothes thought he spotted him on his bike about a mile and a half from McDonalds and radioed in the information.

Detective Constable Jason Hughes was walking south along the towpath of the nearby Grand Union Canal when he saw Khalife riding towards him at around 11am. He grabbed his arm as he attempted to ride past and pulled him to the floor. He was found with a mountain bike and the Waitrose bag he had been pictured with in the Chiswick newsagent as well as a phone, receipts and about £200 in cash. He was over 12 miles away from Wandsworth Prison.

Khalife first made contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps by messaging, Hamed Ghashgabi, one of its members through Facebook in 2019. It is not known what information he shared. He claims that was seeking to promote British interests by giving Tehran dud information but he is known to have given them the names of soldiers serving with British forces. As information was shared on the Telegram app, there is no way to recover what was divulged.

He never met face to face with his Iranian handlers but they gave him £1,500 in cash by leaving it in a dog poop bag in a north London park.

Bethan David, from the Crown Prosecution Service, said, “He surreptitiously sought out and obtained copies of secret and sensitive information which he knew were protected and passed these on to individuals he believed to be acting on behalf of the Iranian state. The sharing of the information could have exposed military personnel to serious harm, or a risk to life, and prejudiced the safety and security of the United Kingdom.

“The prosecution was able to use mobile phone evidence, notes written by Khalife himself and CCTV footage to piece together and demonstrate that Khalife had gathered and shared much of this classified information, accepted hundreds of pounds for his efforts and even travelled to Turkey as part of his unlawful conduct.”

He later approached both MI6 and MI5 offering to be a double agent in a gambit his own defence team described as ‘more Scooby Doo than 007’.

The police are continuing their investigations into who gave him the £400 that enabled him to prolong his escape.